Al-Jawhar al-nadid (book)

Al-Jawhar al-nadid

Author	al-'Allama al-Hilli
Original title	الجَوهَر النَّضید فی شَرح مَنطِق التَّجرید
Language	Arabic
Series	1 vol
Subject	Logic

Al-Jawhar al-naḍīd fī sharḥ manṭiq al-tajrīd (Persian: الجَوهَر النَّضید فی شَرح مَنطِق التَّجرید) is an Arabic book on logic authored by al-'Allama al-Hilli—the book is an exposition of the logic part of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi's Tajrid al-i'tiqad. The logic part of Tajrid is a short and yet comprehensive introduction to logic. Al-'Allama al-Hilli wrote the exposition on the book both because of its brevity and the significant issues discussed in it.

Contents

The logic of Tajrid and its commentary—that is, al-jawhar al-nadid—contains nine chapters:

• Chapter 1: an introduction to logic including issues such as the significance (or denotation) of the words, sorts of prediction, and isagoge (the five universals).
• Chapter 2: on categories (maqūlāt) also including a discussion about the sorts of antecedence (taqaddum) and consequence (ta'akhkhur).
• Chapter 3: on propositions, including issues of the parts of a proposition, its types, the criterion of truth in propositions, the mutual entailment of conditionals, modalities of propositions, contradiction, and contraposition.
• Chapter 4: on syllogism, including issues of its types, the four forms of conjunctive syllogisms (al-qiyas al-'iqtirani), the conditions of deduction, the conditional conjunctive syllogism, exclusive syllogisms (al-qiyas al-'istithna'i), and other relevant issues.
• Chapter 5: proof (burhan) and definition (ta'rif) including discussions of the three types of questions (those of what [ma], whether [hal], and why [lima]), the principles of proofs, the conditions that should be satisfied by premises of a proof, issues of knowledge, types of definition (hadd), the commonality between definitions and proofs.
• Chapter 6: Polemics (jadal), including issues such as the principles of dialectics, matters, and forms.
• Chapter 7: fallacy (mughalata) including the matters of fallacies and their causes.
• Chapter 8: rhetoric (khitaba).
• Chapter 9: poetics (shi'r).

Al-Jawhar al-nadid is written in the style of "he said" (qal) and "I say" ('aqul)—that is, al-'Allama al-Hilli quotes the text of Khwajih Nasir al-Din al-Tusi's Tajrid, illustrating it sentence by sentence. His exposition is critical, analytical, and illustrative. In his exposition, al-'Allama al-Hilli cites the views of well-known logicians, such as Aristotle and Ibn Sina, and in some cases, he cites another work of his own, al-Asrar al-khafiyya.

Style

Khwajih Nasir al-Din al-Tusi has written the logic part of his Tajrid in accordance with the logic part of Ibn Sina's al-Shifa in an Aristotelian style. This is why he discusses categories which are needed for issues of definition in logic. In al-Jawhar al-nadid, al-'Allama al-Hilli follows suit; he discusses the categories and the Five Topics (al-sina'at al-khams), he talks about definitions (hadd) and descriptions (rasm) in the section on proof (burhan), while in the rest of his logical works (such as the logic part of al-Asrar al-khafiyya and al-Qawa'id al-jaliyya) he follows Ibn Sina to take the categories to be a philosophical issue. Of the Five Topics, al-'Allama al-Hilli discusses only two: proofs and fallacies. He discusses definitions and descriptions under the issue of conceptions, rather than proofs. Therefore, he discusses issues of the definition before those of the argument. In the logic part of Tajrid, the nature of logic and its subject-matter is not discussed, but in al-Jawhar al-nadid al-Hilli has discussed them.

Significance

The numerous copies of al-Jawhar al-nadid and its Persian translation are evidence that the book was a standard text of logic. The book has been a focus of attention by late philosophers and contemporary teachers of logic.

Difference with the Other Logical Works of the Author

Al-Jawhar al-nadid is distinguished from the other logical works of al-'Allama al-Hilli in that it is neither too lengthy, nor too short. In this book, he does not concern himself with issues such as the four relations (al-nisab al-'arba') between concepts, the natural universal, the logical universal, and the intellectual universal, the three types of propositions (external, mental, and real), and the analysis of the semantic structure of propositions, though he does discuss these issues in his al-Qawa'id al-jaliyya and al-Asrar al-khafiyya. On the other hand, he discusses issues such as categories and the contradiction in conditionals in al-Jawhar al-nadid, though he does not discuss them in the rest of his logical works.

Translation and Publication

Al-Jawhar al-nadid has been published in Qom in 1381 Sh/2002-3 and 1384 SH/2005-6 on the basis of different old manuscripts of the book, supplemented by Persian commentaries of Muhsin Bidarfar. Manuchihr Sani'i Darrabidi translated the book into Farsi which was published in 1370 Sh (1991) in Tehran.